A third of asthmatics may have been wrongly diagnosed!
What is asthma, are we diagnosing it correctly, and are the drugs prescribed needed?
“Doctors are using observations and not proper tests, study warns. ‘Sufferers’ had allergies or heartburn”. Sarah Knapton, Science Editor.
One third of people with asthma have been wrongly diagnosed, or their condition is no longer active, a study has suggested. Researchers selected more than 700 adults at random who had been diagnosed with asthma in the last five years and checked them again. They found thirty-three percent of people did not appear to have the condition, and nine in ten of these were able to stop their medication completely. Most had minor conditions such as allergies or heartburn, and twenty-eight percent had nothing wrong with them at all.
“It’s impossible to say how many of these patients were originally misdiagnosed with asthma, and how many have asthma that is no longer active,” said the lead author of the study, Prof Shawn Aaron, senior scientist and respirologist at the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa, Canada. “What we do know is that they were all able to stop taking medication that they didn’t need – medication that is expensive and can have side effects.”
Around one in 12 adults in Britain, some 4.3 million people, have asthma, with the study suggesting 1.4 million of them do not have an active condition.
A similar study carried out in The Netherlands last year also suggested that more than half of children are misdiagnosed with asthma.
The new study found that doctors often did not order the tests needed to confirm an asthma diagnosis, and in nearly half of cases based their diagnosis solely on the patient’s symptoms and their own observations.
To further support this finding, research done a decade ago in New Zealand suggested that up to forty percent of those diagnosed with asthma had been wrongly diagnosed, and should not be on the medication prescribed. (Middlemore & Green Hospitals – March 25th 2007)
In fact there is a more significant question and that is “What is asthma?” This question was posed in the Lancet by a concerned doctor, and further demonstrates there is no consensus to the answer. (Vol. 368, No. 9537, 26/8/06)
In the UK, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence is drawing up new guidelines advising doctors to use more clinical tests to back up their judgement and avoid the danger of wrongly labelling someone as asthmatic. Re-evaluation of Diagnosis in Adults With Physician-Diagnosed Asthma – January 17, 2017JAMA. 2017;317(3):269-279. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.19627
Is it not time that a proven clinically tried and tested approach should be offered patients to complement or replace the drug therapy? That approach involves teaching patients better breathing habits to reduce the very common condition of chronic hidden hyperventilation.
One such training system that has stood the test of time is the Buteyko Method, another is the Papworth Method. Both are both clinically and cost effective, giving patients better control of their symptoms and better quality of life, as well as saving millions of pounds in medical costs worldwide.
There is some reticence from the medical establishment, as this would result in a very radical change in their practice and they would like to see far more research before taking this step. Here lies a problem, the main source of research funding comes from the pharmaceutical companies, and asthma drugs can account for up to twenty percent of a company’s earnings. To finance research that demonstrated a vastly reduced need for asthma drugs would impact on their profitability, but they rightly have a responsibility to their shareholders.
Meanwhile millions of people worldwide are either wrongly diagnosed with asthma, or are being treated with far more medication than would be necessary if they were offered an alternative approach of breath training!
Michael Lingard BSc. DO. WPNut.Cert
Understanding Asthma – a different viewpoint – YouTube video
